1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to website development, and, more particularly, to a method, system and computer program product for managing dynamic content of website.
2. Background Art
Current development trends in the fields of enterprise resource management (ERP) or its close “relation”, customer relationship management (CRM), involve moving some of the functionality of the ERP/CRM software from the client side to the server side. This is generally driven by the fact that supporting multiple hardware platforms, multiple operating systems, multiple versions of operating systems (or different/evolving hardware and software) is fairly burdensome for a corporation's IT department. The maintenance of such ERP software, the need for frequent updates, and so on, all combine to make such ERP software relatively resource intensive. At the same time, vendors who provide the software also need to support multiple hardware and software platforms, requiring additional developer effort, additional support from the vendor, and so forth.
Browser-based forms are known in the art, where a form is shown to a user on a web page, and the user can fill in the form. Such conventional browser-based software can work with HTML code. However, the functionality of such forms is fairly limited, and the interface between the forms and the actual software that uses the data in the forms, is also fairly limited.
Websites typically display, to a user, some data retrieved from a database. Connections between the displayed formatted reports and the tables of the database are maintained by computer software. A significant part of Operating System resources is used for creation of report forms and formatting of data being displayed on the website.
Conventional methods do not offer any capabilities for creation of generic graphical report forms, which can be populated by generic data. This is partly due to the fact that the proprietary database interface cannot be replaced. The structure of the database defines a particular format of requests, making it difficult to create a generic form populated by a generic data.
However, when user interfaces are created, or when other operations are performed, such as creation of binary reports, the proprietary database forms supplied with a DBMS (Data Base Management System) do not need to be created. On the other hand, direct access of a database by a client computer has a number of disadvantages, such as increased traffic and computational overhead associated with execution of scripts, which have to be processed by a command interpreter right on the client computer.
Accordingly, there is a need for a computationally efficient method for generation of generic report forms that can be populated with generic data, and for a system and method that permits an enterprise to generate user fillable forms, based on business logic, which are not resource intensive, from the enterprises perspective, which are reusable, and which are maximally granular.